The importance of accounting data migration during the ERP implementation

Information systems are nowadays a standard way to processed accounting and serves to meet the accounting entity's primary accounting duties. The acquisition of the information system represents a significant investment for the entity. The reasons for the acquisition are divided into external (functionality extension) and internal (new functionality requirements). Despite a high initial investment, more than 40% of implementations exceed the financial or timeframe, resulting in a deterioration in output quality. In the implementation phase, it is necessary to ensure the continuity of accounting books, to transfer both master and transactional data, thereby ensuring the compliance of accounting statements with statutory regulation. Data migration is recognized as one of the key critical factors, nevertheless is not paid enough attention to it. Elimination of data migration errors is aided by an implementation audit that takes account of the change in the processing of accounting operations. The specificity of the audit of ERP systems is in requiring knowledge of both accounting and IT. To ensure successful implementation in line with the objective, it is possible to define critical success factors, broken down into strategic and tactical. The most common CSFs include communications, top management support, business process customization, and data migration.From the questionnaire survey conducted in the Czech manufacturing company, where the SAP Business One implementation took place in the years 2014-2016, as a most important critical success factors were identified the cooperation between departments, the communication between the head office and the subsidiary and the management support. The migration of master and transaction data has been identified as critical for future implementation in the parent company. In the part relating to the master data, the time needed to prepare and clean the data was identified as the most critical. The volume of data was not significant. Data was possible, except for one case, to extract from the original systems. In the part relating to the transactional data, it was identified as the problematic time needed to prepare and extract data from the original system and the amount of data modifications. The usual time to prepare data ranged from 2-4 months. The results of the questionnaire survey were used in creating a strategy in the parent company for an ERP system implementation project involving all the key processes in the company. The area of further research will focus on evaluating ongoing implementation in the parent company.